Post a historic photo (or painting) of an area of your city. Then add a google street view image from the same angle showing current conditions. Additionally, give a brief explanation of the context and factors affecting the visible changes to the urban form.

__________________"Asheville air affects me like champagne; it goes to my head. I'm apt to do things for which I will be sorry in the grim dawn of New York." -- William G. Raoul, 1898"After 30 years here, all I know is Asheville is a place where old souls and terrible angels walk among us..." -- Dale Neal, 2015

Oh, this one's a real jewel! A local museum has a whole set of photographs by two photographers, William Notman and Andrzej Manciejewski, taken from identical spots, but with Notman working from 1869-1895, and Manciejewski working in and around the year 2000. They're presented side by side in a slideshow with audio reflecting the sounds each would have heard standing in these locations, and how they would have changed over the centuries. The link is below and the city being photographed is Montreal, which was the economic and cultural heart of the Dominion, as Canada's largest city, up and until the political instability of the seventies.

There was a great thread about a year or so ago about before/after South Bronx (1970s & 1980s vs. present)

__________________There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know. -Donald RumsfeldDidn't you notice on the plane when you started talking, eventually I started reading the vomit bag?

Even in the historical photo, you can see private use of cars easily trumped over the mass transit of the day. However, to alleviate the congestion, city planners built freeways that directly paralleled Grand River as well as other major thoroughfares. This indeed got rid of congestion on the surface streets, but as you can also see, less traffic also means less business.

Racial inequality as well as an ever shifting economy contributed to general city wide population loss that left many similar thoroughfares vacant or struggling to survive.

The block of buildings on the left side of the street is the only continuous block of buildings that survived. All of the buildings on the right from the original photo were taken out to widen Michigan Avenue. This is all about a quarter mile from Detroit's most famous abandoned structure, the train station.

That area off Jensen is really a wasteland. It's a couple blocks between a freeway and a rail line. Eventually an extension of the Hardy Toll Road will plow through there as well, not much to loose at this point so why not.

But I'd rather have desegregation and the assimilation of minorities in the suburbs even if some nostalgic old main streets that you can guarantee would have bit the dust anyway a few years later were lost

The change in this area is astounding... there is a lot of this type of change happening in others areas of the city as well such as Francisville, Callowhill, Spring Arts (West Poplar), Kensington and Northern Liberties in Lower North Philly

Love the Philly transformation shots. Better than cream cheese on a bagel.

__________________There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know. -Donald RumsfeldDidn't you notice on the plane when you started talking, eventually I started reading the vomit bag?